In order to communicate network traffic between a source device and a destination device, packet forwarding networks forward packets between network devices, such as routers and switches, along the path between the source and the destination. In some computer networks, network devices implement various forwarding strategies, which can include store-and-forward and cut-through forwarding. With store-and-forward, the entire network packet is received before it is forwarded on. With cut-through forwarding, the network device does not have to wait for the entire packet to be received before beginning to forward it on to the next network device.
While cut-through forwarding can reduce the latency of network packets being transmitted through the computer network, cut-through forwarding has some drawbacks. For example, with cut-through forwarding corrupted network packets can be transmitted across a number of network devices before the problem is discovered. In addition it may be difficult to identify the particular source of the network packet corruption because a number of network devices may register the error.